Pilgrim in the Palace of Words Read online

  Many of the monasteries are built over old sky burial sites. These are geographical points of significance from which souls depart, from which the Bardo Thötröl is invoked.

  I was thinking a lot about the Bardo Thötröl. It seemed the sort of unfamiliar way of thinking I was searching for. Tashi kept using the English word soul when he spoke about the Bardo Thötröl. I saw him talking it over with Amit. “It’s not quite right,” Amit said. “Tashi wants you to know that the English word soul isn’t quite the right translation, but you don’t have any other word, so it will have to do.”

  Words, contrary to what current political correctness might say, aren’t always easily translated from one language into another. They don’t always match up. The Tibetan canon is filled with complex philosophical ideas, and when we try to translate them into English, we’re often at a loss. Soul, for example, is a word heavy with Judeo-Christian connotations. When Tibetans die, a kind of energy leaves their bodies. It isn’t the individual’s consciousness. I’ve heard it referred to instead as “clear light,” and that’s a better approximation. It’s a “life force” that departs a body at death only to take up lodging in another creature a short time later.

  So translations don’t exactly correspond. Suffering, for example, comes up a lot in Western tracts on Buddhism. Buddha himself famously observed that to be born is to suffer. The exact word he used was dukkha. But suffering isn’t quite it. Dukkha means “hard to bear,” all right, but it also includes the ideas of dissatisfaction, a something-is-not-quite-right feeling, something frustrating and hollow. It’s perhaps more closely aligned to Henry David Thoreau’s observation that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” And we all know how true that is.

  To my great surprise there isn’t even a word in Tibetan for Buddhist. The term Tibetans use is nangha, which means “insider.” Again this leads to misconceptions on the part of Westerners. Nangha doesn’t refer to those who were born in Tibet. It’s not a term of exclusion that makes the rest of us “outsiders.” Nangha — “insider” — means “those who look inside themselves,” or those who meditate, who have recognized that external things are only temporary and illusive.

  The point, and it’s an important one, is that in words of cultural significance, translations are dangerous things. We’re usually okay with the denotations of a word (that is, a word’s direct reference — this tree, that mountain), but a whirl of connotations also surround them, connotations that aren’t usually apparent to those outside the language group. Such words carry weights and subtle shadings that aren’t always obvious to foreigners, so the only way to understand them is to let go of everything that’s familiar to us, to cut the moorings of our Western mindsets and sail into the unknown.

  After Zhang Mu, we drove for almost an entire day into the highest mountains on Earth. We passed through the clouds. Waterfalls gushed down the hills, and for hours and hours there was no one else on this hairpin road. No towns, no signs, nothing but a dirt track winding up into the vast Himalayas.

  In the late afternoon the landscape suddenly changed. We had reached the Nyalum Pass. Nyalum means something like “the path to hell.” We had come out above the clouds into a moonscape where the only signs of life were the rock cairns strewn with long strings of Buddhist prayer flags.

  At three thousand metres the Nyalum Pass is the true entrance to Tibet. In front of us was a desolate land, the Tibetan Plateau, the roof of the world, an area almost the size of India. Even the low valleys here are higher than the tops of the Canadian Rockies in my own backyard. And we weren’t done. Our party continued up after that to the Lalung La Pass at more than five thousand metres. We inched over it and found that we had at last put the highest of the mountains behind us.

  The dirt track we were travelling on ribboned between mountain passes for a thousand kilometres all the way to Lhasa. It’s called the Friendship Highway, but that’s a cruel euphemism. During the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, Mao Zedong’s Red Guards ravaged this sad land, destroying more than sixty-five hundred monasteries. Here and there we could see the ruins on the tops of mountains. The monks from these monasteries, gentle old men who had spent much of their lives in quiet study and prayer, were forced to work on the road we were now travelling along. Many of them died during its construction.

  On the second day, thumping along the so-called Friendship Highway, our guide Tashi finally spoke to me. We had stopped beside some nameless expanse to take photographs when he crept quietly up to me.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “You are Canadian?”

  I’d walked off to stand beside a gurgling stream, and he’d followed. The others were taking snapshots of the mountains behind us. “Yes,” I said.

  “Then I will tell you something. A friend of mine is now in jail … for three years.”

  “Why?”

  “He was the same as me. He was guiding a group like this across to Lhasa. All of them were Canadian.” He looked at me hard. “My friend began to tell them of the troubles. He spoke about things he should not have. And then …”

  “What?”

  “At the end, when they came to Lhasa, one of the Canadians …”

  “Yes?”

  “One of the Canadians was not Canadian. The man had a false passport. He was a spy. He turned in the guide, and now my friend is in jail for three years. Do you understand? I see you writing and I must talk to you. I must warn you to be careful.”

  Tashi stared at me for a few moments. “I must ask that you do not use my name in your writing. There are only a few Tibetan guides left. I am afraid for my job. Now they bring three hundred Chinese guides down. They are on a salary, but we are only paid for each trip, and there are fewer and fewer trips assigned to us. I think I will not be able to work much longer.”

  So Tashi isn’t his real name. He also asked that I not use any photographs of him. It was too dangerous, and I began to see my own ridiculous fears for what they really were. I had been afraid he was a Chinese Communist Party official. He, in turn, had been gravely afraid of us. It had taken a few days, but Tashi was finally assured that none of us were spies. When we got back on our bus, he made his first full speech to all of us. “Inside the bus,” he instructed us, “you can ask me anything. I will tell you the truth. When we are stopped, though, and especially when we are in the monasteries, please, you are not to speak of politics.”

  That night we pulled into Tingri, the first real town since the border. The place where we stayed had a number of tiny rooms built around a gravel courtyard. There were squat toilets around the side — hideous, smelly things where it was best to pinch your nose, close your eyes, and get your business over with as quickly as possible.

  After sorting our things, we gathered in the little inn. At the low tables inside I tried, for the first and last time, the famous yak butter tea. It’s called solja or föcha, depending on the dialect (the ja or cha root coming from the Sanskrit chai for “tea”). My God, it was terrible stuff — like warm, salty liquid lard.

  “It’s bearable,” one of our group members insisted, “as long as you don’t think of it as tea. Think soup … and it’s not that bad.”

  There had been no rain since the day we left — we were up too high for that now — but the clouds filled the sky like a flat grey slate.

  “When the skies are blue,” Tashi said, “you can see the full range of the Himalayas from here.”

  We were lucky enough to see one of the great mountains — Cho Oyu, the Turquoise Goddess. I’d never heard of it before, but at 8,200 metres it’s the sixth highest peak on the planet.

  “Just behind that hill,” Tashi said, waving across the long plain, “is Mount Everest.”

  Unfortunately, there was nothing behind the hill except clouds, and I had already acquired the beginning of a fierce headache. Everyone felt terrible. It was the first sign of altitude sickness. I went to my room to lie down. At about seven in the evening I happened to glance up from the book I was
reading and spotted a high, snowy peak dancing above the clouds outside the window. It was just behind the little hill.

  “Mount Everest!” I cried. Jumping up, I ran outside and knocked on the doors of the other rooms. “The clouds have broken! You can see it!”

  Everyone poured out. We all went back up to the dirt road and watched as the mountain unveiled itself. Some Tibetan children descended from the village. “Chomolungma,” I said to them, but of course they saw it almost every day of their lives. They smiled at me, amused at my excitement. In Tibetan, Chomolungma means “Goddess Mother Earth” — a better name, by far, than ours.

  I was looking at the little-seen North Face. In 1924 Englishman George Mallory attempted to climb the mountain from this side. Mallory was the one who, when asked why he wanted to climb Everest, famously quipped, “Because it’s there.” He died on the northeast shoulder of the mountain, the first of many Westerners, and it wasn’t until 1999 that his mummified body was discovered in the ice at eight thousand metres. No one knows for sure if he was on his way up or whether he had, in fact, reached the summit and was on his way down to the safety of his base camp.

  The top of Everest, or Chomolungma, is actually in the jet stream. Fierce winds rage off its summit, and we were lucky to see it at all. Tibetans, though, don’t consider Chomolungma to be particularly sacred. Their most hallowed peak, and the goal of many pilgrimages, is Mount Kailash far to the west. Kailash is thought by Tibetans to be the source of the four major rivers of Asia, one going north, one south, one east, and one west. The one that drops to the south is the legendary Ganges, the most holy of Hindu rivers.

  When we came to the next high pass, Gyatso La at 5,252 metres, I saw more strings of prayer flags. In Tibetan they’re called lungta or “wind horses.” In Tibetan Buddhism the mind is often likened to a horse. In the beginning it’s a wild thing, bucking, fearful, and skittish. It needs to be subdued, trained, and focused. These wind horses are yet another metaphor to be opened up, another door into the understanding of the language and the people.

  Tibet and Mongolia, of course, are well-known for their horses. Tibetans are thought to have migrated a couple of thousand years ago from Mongolia, and the two languages are definitely related. Nomadic herders probably brought these short, stocky horses with them. It is believed that these animals can race forever, and thus the idea of the wind horse arose.

  Set on the high passes these prayer flags gallop on the winds to the far corners of the world. They’re blessings, each pertaining to one of the five elements.

  “Five elements?” I asked Tashi. The wind was blowing hard, and I had to lean into him to hear his answer.

  “Yes.” His voice rose above the screaming wind. “In the West you have four elements.”

  “Earth, air, water, and fire.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you have five?”

  “The fifth element is …” Tashi hesitated. We’d had problems with this word before. “The fifth element is the soul.”

  And there it was again. The flags were fluttering behind us in strings of five repeating colours. The white flags were for the soul, clear light, the life energy that’s neither born nor dies, the thing that’s all around us and is as central to the Tibetan universe as water and fire.

  Tashi later told me the story of an ancient king who chopped down too many trees for firewood. The king himself became sick, as all things are connected, and the only solution was to hang green flags (that colour representing earth) to put things back into balance. It worked. The king recovered, and the trees began to grow again.

  I once heard a man on the radio say that these prayer flags were set out on high mountain passes so that their prayers could easily reach heaven. That’s a twisting of the real idea to conform to our Western religious beliefs. The flags instead are more like compassion wishes. They don’t ask for anything. They’re simply hopes that little sparkles of compassion will fly out on the winds to reach all living things everywhere.

  Two days later we came to Shigatse and the famous monastery at Tashilhunpo. Tashi seemed agitated. “This,” he explained, “is the monastery of the Panchen Lama, the second highest lama to his holiness, the Dalai Lama. Please,” Tashi warned us again. “Do not talk of politics here.”

  Tashilhunpo once held several thousand monks. Now there is only a handful. It’s a dark, low-beamed place with the smell of a thousand years of yak butter candles.

  As we entered, a man emerged and suddenly waved us back, almost pushing us out the door.

  “What’s happening?” I asked Tashi.

  “He says the monastery is temporarily closed,” Tashi said. Then he suddenly lowered his voice. “High party officials are arriving. We must wait. We can go in only after they leave.”

  Sure enough, a Land Rover pulled up, surrounded by police vehicles. I had a video camera and flicked it on. Tashi nudged me. “Not a good idea,” he hissed. As I started to shut off the camera, I felt a presence behind me. I turned and there was the largest Chinese man I’d ever seen. He wore dark sunglasses, and though there was no earphone wire dangling into his collar, I could tell immediately that he was a security agent. I didn’t have to be told twice. I turned off the camera.

  An hour or so later, when the coast was clear, we entered the monastery. Tashi pointed out a large photo of the tenth Panchen Lama. “He died in 1989,” Tashi said. Beneath it was a photo of a boy. “And that is the reincarnation, the eleventh Panchen Lama.” He swept us on abruptly into the next room.

  It was only when we got back out onto the road, thumping along in our bus, that Tashi stood to speak. He was upset. “I wish to say now that the boy in the picture is not the true Panchen Lama.” Tashi’s words emerged with difficulty. “Let me tell you the full story.” He took a deep breath and said that in 1959 when the Dalai Lama fled from Tibet the Panchen Lama had remained. Choekyi Gyaltsen, the tenth incarnation of the Panchen, believed it was better to try to work with the Chinese government.

  During the Cultural Revolution, however, the Chinese threw the Panchen Lama in jail. And even when he was finally released many years later, he was only allowed to make brief trips back to Tashilhunpo. On a cold January day in 1989 the Panchen Lama was visiting Tashilhunpo. He complained of feeling ill and went to bed early. The Panchen Lama was fifty years old at the time, and all reports suggest he wasn’t in the best of shape. A few hours later a monk was sent up to bring him an extra blanket against the cold. The monk was surprised to find the room surrounded by Chinese security agents. They wouldn’t let anybody in. In the morning they announced that the Panchen Lama had died during the night.

  Tashi paused and looked at us one by one. “It is possible that he died in his sleep of natural causes, but we Tibetans do not believe that. They would not allow anyone to see the body, so we believe he was poisoned. You must understand this. It is the job of the Dalai Lama to find the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama. Only he can do that. In the same way it is the job of the Panchen Lama to find the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. That is how it works. And now this boy, our true Panchen Lama, is missing.”

  “Who is the boy in the photo then?” I asked.

  “The Chinese named their own Panchen Lama. Both of his parents are members of the Communist Party, and now everyone must worship this new boy, but he is not the Panchen Lama.”

  It was a brilliant and terrible stroke. The present Dalai Lama is over seventy years old. He is in good health, but the day will come when he will die, and when he does, there will only be the Chinese-controlled Panchen Lama to find his reincarnation — and then the old way will be finished. An ancient line will be severed forever.

  A brutal blow had been delivered to the very heart of Tibet, and I thought again of the Bardo Thötröl, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It seemed to me as if the first chants were beginning. Here was a culture being killed. Here was slow death, a gradual strangulation.

  It took us almost ten days to drive from Kathmandu to Lhasa, and we pass
ed few real towns. The people here are scattered, and many continue to lead nomadic lives, moving across the plains with their goats and yaks.

  When we did encounter towns, the people were suddenly different. In every major settlement the population was more than half Han Chinese. Chinese shops lined streets that were strung with red banners proclaiming Communist Party slogans. There were soldiers, guards, and spies almost everywhere.

  The Chinese call Tibet Xizang. Xi is “west”; zang is often translated as “treasure box.” It’s a Chinese character homonym. The character is sounded out zang, but also represents tsang, the word for the ancient Tibetan region for which Tashilhunpo is the capital.

  The Tibetan Plateau is a treasure box rich in minerals. It boasts gold and silver, but it also has significant reserves of uranium. David, one of the Norwegians in our group, claimed that the Chinese weren’t only harvesting this uranium but also using Tibet’s vast plains for nuclear waste dumps. And then there was the hydroelectric power. If the force of the rivers that careened off the high mountains could be harnessed, they could easily provide power for much of western China. Indeed, almost the last thing the tenth Panchen Lama spoke out against was the building of a dam on the road between Tashilhunpo and Lhasa. We passed by it, and in the stone-cold waters of the lake that had now been formed, the ruins of a monastery rose on an island. It was sad and beautiful and dreadfully lonely out there in the backwash of the dam.

  There are no exact numbers, but the population of indigenous Tibetan people is thought to be fewer than six million. They’re spread, as I’ve said, over an area almost as large as India, a region a full sixth of the total Chinese land mass. In fact, Tibetans aren’t a unified people at all. In the west reside the Khampa, fiercely nomadic and famous horse riders. We saw many Khampa on pilgrimages, hair braided with bright red wool, faces darkened and chiselled by the sun and wind. In the north are the Amdo. The current Dalai Lama was born in this region, and the dialect he spoke as a child, indeed the tongue his mother employed throughout her life, couldn’t be understood in Lhasa.